MERICA’S LONG NIGHTMARE OF PEACE AND PROSPERITY OVER.” The headline that should’ve woke up America but it was in the Onion, and they woke up soon enough anyway. They woke up – while their enemies had heard the call to Rise Up!

“The market takes the best and punishes the rest/ And I wonder if it’s really worth the fight…the rising tide drowns the poor and lifts the pirates higher/ Their crimson ships can ride the dips, they're masters of this sewer/ Oh, the water's stinking, our little raft is sinking/ But the alcohol we're floating in tonight/ Makes it easy to believe that it's all right…”

There are odd plinks and plunks and vocal noises offstage throughout the 70s moderne production that supposedly justified Jim O’Rourke’s production fee but it’s not that different-sounding from any 70s Island record or Bryan Ferry’s In Your Mind, right down to the violin trowelled onto everything like the turbulence make-up scene in Airplane, but Conn and O’Rourke dig deeper into the 8-track bin with the opening horns, such tinny valvulations untouched since the days of everyone’s hip uncle’s favorite rock’n’roll beat unit Chicago- who dedicated their second album to “the revolution in all of its forms.” Chicago were wide-eyed baby boomer babies who recorded double- and triple-album laments to how implausibly fucking stupid and blinkered their parents’ generation was. Imagine that, fighting a war – rising up! – against fascism and sweating in the hot sun digging bomb shelters for their kids to comfortably drop LSD in – only to vote for Nixon! The dead-eyed, lifesucking authoritarian pigs!

And Chicago? They kept placarding and draft-card-burning (though they did find time to dis amnestyland Canada on the way, fuckheads) until realising that they could record 900 hours of the same quiet-storm septum-salve at once and release 40-minute chunks of it from XIII to X(x)(x). This happened for two reasons. One, their guitarist shot himself in the head playing ‘Beer Hunter’, if I recall correctly. Two, somebody (from the city named after them) named Bobby Conn went back and showed them that Onion headline, and told them. There will be no revolution here. Can you dig it brothers and sisters! Rise up!

There will be no revolution, jams will remain unkicked (unlike my fucking slow-ass computer which is about to be ‘re-BOOTED’ in a minute), the tide shall ‘rise up’, and soon the differential between the highest- and lowest- wage earners in a so-called democracy will ‘rise up’ exponentially so every day they’ll have to put another zero on it, and a cartel of professional (also related, kinda like the Manson family who provided background vocals on occasion) statecraft navigators will realise, hey, the bigger the base of the pyramid the higher we can put the helipad. “When you’re brought up to accept it, you expect it, like it’s a fact!” And if you don’t expect something, you won’t get it, right? So the first part of the equation is necessary. “Kind of a drag/ When you’re just trying to get it on/ for the first time”, huh? Bobby Conn’s falsetto is almost as soothing as Peter Cetera’s was on “Anyway You Want”, from ‘Chicago VIII’. That was the one with the poster, the iron-on t-shirt transfer (remember those? After one wash the ‘Chicago’ logo would look like this – Chicago) and Peter Cetera doing a falsetto like Bobby Conn, except he was saying “Anything You Want”, and BC’s saying you won’t get anything period.

They’re both telling the truth, except PC’s talking to the pirates, and BC’s telling us to ‘Rise Up’. Even though he knows we can’t. He’s an angel, breaking our balls. (That particular Italian-American - or perhaps more accurately, movie IA - locution causes intense involuntary shudders whenever I hear it! Mama mia, What kind of sadist would come up with that phrase? But Bobby makes it sing so sweetly, like the “angels” doing the scrotum-squashing he describes. That is a feat.)

The final track on ‘Golden Age’ is called “Whores” and it starts with Big Star’s “Ballad of El Goodo” chord sequence played with RECORDERS. The Cowboy Woody of instruments (in relation to the violin’s Buzz Lightyear, in relation to the guitars/drums/theme/execution’s snuff-film producer using the toys as actor bait, in relation to the album-qua-album’s Hello Kitty). It’s moving in the way the disease kid is moving in those TVMs they don’t make ‘seriously’ anymore, the way they don’t let the retching and fainting and chopstick limbs and having three days to live stop them from mowing the lawn for the quadriplegic next door. “I don’t need to be defended/ Just even Jesus Christ pretended/ to be a man.”

Of course, in those days people actually HAD lawns. Lucky quadriplegic fucker.